(Yicai Global) March 14 -- Dr. He Xiaodong, a former artificial intelligence scientist for Microsoft Corp., has joined JD.Com Inc. to work as executive vice president of the e-commerce giant's artificial intelligence lab and director of its deep learning, speech and language lab.

The labs will focus on basic research into deep learning, natural language processing and speech recognition, and will apply their findings to JD.Com's retail, logistics, finance and cloud computing businesses, Touchweb reported, citing the Beijing-based company.

Several other scientists from US technology giants also joined JD.Com last year, including Zhou Bowen, former chief scientist of IBM Watson, Samuel Shen, a pervious chairman at Microsoft Asia-Pacific Technology Co., and Bo Liefeng, who served as chief scientist of Amazon Inc.

He worked for Microsoft for more than a decade as principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond lab and head of the Deep Learning Technology Center. He is also an adjunct professor and doctoral supervisor at the University of Washington, Seattle.

His research results have enjoyed extensive application in Microsoft products, including its Office software, cloud service platform Azure, intelligent application for visually-impaired patients Seeing AI, and chat robot Zo.